"Your mother," Lucas said, "will telephone Ethel in the morning."
"That's good, father."
"That all, boy?"
"Yes," Bennet said.
"Good night, boy."
But Bennet wanted to know something more; he delayed, thinking how to lead to it indirectly, until his hesitation obliged him to ask outright:
"Father, what's Jim Quinlan to do in this?" And for the first time in his life, Bennet saw his father start like an ordinary man who may be frightened. Very quickly his father recovered and was Lucas Cullen, Junior, once more.
"Who said Jim Quinlan had?" he asked calmly.
"Ethel."
"What did she say?'
"Why, she really only asked about a James Quinlan, if we employed one, father. She didn't seem to know anything concerning him but—" At his father's request, Bennet repeated just about what Ethel had said.
"That's all right," Lucas said finally. "Now go on to bed, boy."
Bennet looked up at his father, who somehow seemed to have got a little disheveled while they were talking; probably his thick, black hair had been a little mussed before, but Bennet had not noticed it; and it seemed to him that his father's eyes were duller. Bennet returned to his own room, rather miserably, and conscious that affairs in his family, which had seemed so serene only a few hours ago, had suddenly taken a turn for the perilous; with the bitter perverseness of youth suddenly disturbed in the unthreatened enjoyment of ease and advantage, he blamed not the cause of the
